Finishing my morning cup of tea, then out into the yard to transform the heaps of dirt into the look of landscaping.

We weren't able to replace the entire line. The section close to the house is sound, but it is under a corner of an extension of the foundation, so the new piece is a few feet out from the house. And down at the curb - there is a gas line somewhere under there, and these guys regularly work for a public works department in a neighboring city - they know better than most the risk and danger of hitting a gas line. So they dug to within a few feet of the curb and connected to the line from the street. I'll still have to use root killer twice a year to treat that end of the line, but the breaks in the connections that ran through the yard will no longer be part of the equation. The cast iron segments were held together with rubber boots held in place by hose clamps. The rubber had failed and roots had been going through.

Now that I know that that shallow bed in front of the house is a couple of inches of soil over a true part of the foundation, I'm going to take advantage of it and extend a porch out there. That's a project for next year.

P.S. Michelle, your closet plan sounds like a winner. If you find something exceptional you'd forgotten about as you clear out, you can decide to add it to the keep pile or not - but feel totally virtuous about clearing the space. I have a few bins up on shelves in my closet I should probably do that with also. They're clear bins with a paper in view on the inside telling me the size and contents - I kept what I felt were the "classic" pieces of sizes I hope to get into in the future. Those bins have been taking up space for a long time now. I'll have to ask myself what else I would do with that space. Congratulations on deciding what direction to move with this project.